In the last four years, risk to Americans has increased, in part, due to the escalating number of terrorists attempting to cross the border into the US. And there have been several school and workplace shootings. The product of a Plant City company, Campus Risk Solutions (CRS), is to keep us all safer.“Campus” includes every location where people gather, such as schools, workplaces, hospitals, transportation hubs, and sports and entertainment venues. According to the company web site, “The U.S. lacks a universal standard to secure campuses and respond to threats.”
“My dream is for Americans to adopt a preparedness lifestyle that stands up when catastrophe strikes, and chaos ensues,” said Elissa-Beth Gross, founder and CEO of CRS. “I hate violence, and don’t like it that long-term victims tend to be those that start out shaky…no emergency savings or financial literacy, no survival skills. Resilience requires starting earlier and delving deeper to get ahead of threats as a community. Just like in air traffic control, only a fragment of time should be spent responding to emergencies, the rest is on maintaining situational awareness and building capacity to respond effectively.”
Gross has been driven by a handful of catalytic events that interested her in anti-bullying and violence prevention campaigns, including 9/11 and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting tragedy. She founded CRS to onboard, organize, and help campuses network to stay current on incident management updates, upgrades, and tactics to stay ahead of the increasing number of threats of violence to keep people safe.
Gross’s education is in mathematics and business administration, with certificates in Nonprofit Management and Professional Meeting & Event Planning. After exiting two family founded, publicly-traded tech companies, she started The Art of Prevention Corporation, a 501(c)3 to raise awareness on preventing injury, fatality and psychological trauma.
Gross’s vision for CRS is that it will become the catalyst that mobilizes a government-academic-industry alliance to fully act on the National Preparedness Goal. This goal is to achieve, “A secure and resilient nation with the capabilities required across the whole community to prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to, and recover from the threats and hazards that pose the greatest risk.”
Though the National Preparedness Goal is clear, getting to that point is not. “Efforts to close security gaps are siloed and duplicitous,” Gross said. “Laws and policies are enacted before standards are hashed out, leading to confusion and noncompliance. The government is geared to respond when a threat is imminent or occurring, but benefit, and daily task, preparing as a “community of campuses” is overlooked.”
CRS’s plan is to provide the model and methods to harden workplace infrastructure in America, and create a mutually beneficial safety net. “There is a need to reduce the number and severity of incidents and minimize reliance on limited lifeline resources,” Gross commented on the need her company meets.
The CRS program is based on guidance deployed by all branches of the U.S. Military and Emergency Services. “Mission areas are spelled out, from prevention through to mitigation and recovery,” Gross said. “Our subscribers will be engaged in two activities as they build out the model: raising resilience level, and lowering threat level.”
CRS has over a decade of research and development invested in designing and tweaking their wireframe, content curation to populate their platform, and uploading some of the code on a secure global cloud. The company is currently building relationships with legislators, educators, federal agencies, state agencies, accelerators, businesses, and government contract advisors to spread and network its strategy and systems.
Success for CRS will mean future safety for all of us.